Over the last six years, S.D. has often thought about what she says happened inside an exam room at Utah Valley University’s student clinic.
She remembers how a nurse practitioner opened her thin, yellow paper gown to expose her chest, she said, and how he gave her a breast exam — her first — that was unlike any medical care she has experienced since.
At the beginning of the exam, she said, he palpated her breasts with his fingertips. But then he ran his fingers around her areolas, she alleges, before jiggling her breast while cupping it in his hand.
S.D. said she has long reflected about how the exam in 2018 felt off, and wondered, “What medical reason did he have to jiggle my breast? What medical reason would he have to touch my nipples like that?”
The touching that S.D. described in a recent interview and has also recounted in a civil lawsuit is in contrast to professional standards for gynecologists, which advise medical workers to use only their fingertips during a breast exam.
S.D. said she had dismissed her feelings of discomfort until earlier this year, when she was scrolling through TikTok and she saw a post by The Salt Lake Tribune. It detailed an investigative report about a nurse practitioner who had been reported to police by four patients accusing him of sexual assault. As soon as she saw a photo of UVU’s campus in the post, S.D. said, she was certain it was about the same medical worker who examined her: Derrick Pickering.
“I felt sick,” she recalled. “I didn’t even have to pull [the article] up. I pulled it up, and it was him.”
S.D. has now joined another former Utah Valley University student in a federal lawsuit against both Pickering and the college in Orem. They argue in the suit that UVU did not protect them from the nurse practitioner, who they allege conducted unnecessary medical exams for his own sexual gratification.
Before S.D. went into that exam room in 2018, two other student patients had reported Pickering to campus police — including the other plaintiff in the suit. Pickering remained employed at UVU until 2021, when the university quietly asked him to resign after he conducted a pelvic exam after hours without a medical assistant present.
S.D. is now the fifth woman to accuse Pickering in reports to police or in civil lawsuits. Draper police have been investigating Pickering during the past year, but he has not been charged criminally and his license remains in good standing with the Division of Professional Licensing. The Salt Lake Tribune generally doesn’t name alleged victims of sexual abuse, and is identifying several women in this story by their initials.
UVU spokesperson Scott Trotter said in a statement that the university is aware of the lawsuit and “takes these matters very seriously.”
“Our priority is the well-being and success of our students, faculty, and staff and we are committed to maintaining a safe and supportive environment for them,” he said. “As this is an ongoing legal matter, we are unable to provide further comments.”
Because Pickering is being sued in his capacity as a university employee, he’s being represented by a lawyer within the Utah attorney general’s office. That attorney, Adam Wentz, said Pickering denies the lawsuit’s accusations and said the medical worker never deviated from medical guidelines and standards, noting female medical staff were always present during these exams.
Wentz said in a statement that he plans to file a motion to dismiss the lawsuit and hopes “that any unwarranted damage to Mr. Pickering’s reputation will be quickly remedied.”
“While Mr. Pickering and the Attorney General’s Office are sympathetic to anyone who feels they have been an assault victim, a thorough investigation of the facts made clear to us there was no assault in this case, and Mr. Pickering categorically denies any wrongdoing,” Wentz said. “He has cared for hundreds of women in his ten years as a nurse practitioner and has been praised by many for his compassionate approach.”
The first two reports
University officials said Pickering began seeing patients at UVU’s student health center in February 2015. Seven months later, a student identified in public records as J.Y. alleged to campus police that he had touched her inappropriately during a medical exam.
It doesn’t appear the police investigated thoroughly — in a report, an officer wrote that he was unable to contact the alleged victim and closed the case, concluding it was a “misunderstanding due to cultural differences.” Steve Owens, another attorney for Pickering, has previously denied these accusations and said Pickering was never informed of this report at that time.
Less than a year after J.Y.’s report, C.C., a 27-year-old international student from Peru, came to the clinic in June 2016. She wanted to serve a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and needed a medical exam.
The woman said in an interview that Pickering was insistent that he do a breast and vaginal exam — and she said she recalls him telling her he would not sign her missionary paperwork unless she agreed to them. C.C. remembered Pickering telling her that because she was 27 years old, she needed these types of exams, she said.
C.C. did not want the exams and didn’t think she needed them, she said, but she felt she had no choice but to agree. She said she didn’t realize that something may have been wrong with the exam until 2018, she said, after another UVU nurse practitioner told her those types of exams are not necessary for potential missionaries.
C.C. reported Pickering to police a few weeks after speaking with the second nurse practitioner. But she recalled in an interview that when she went to law enforcement, she felt the officer thought she was lying or simply complaining. Campus police closed her case, according to a police report, and the director of the medical center told an officer that he believed Pickering followed recommended medical guidelines.
Owens denied that Pickering refused to sign her paperwork unless she agreed to a Pap smear, which involves collecting cells from the cervix to test for cancer. He said the nurse practitioner followed appropriate medical standards and had “had no incentive other than to take good care of his patients.”
C.C. has joined S.D. in suing Utah Valley University and Pickering in federal court, in the lawsuit that attorney Adam Sorenson filed in September. In the suit, C.C. alleges that several mandatory reporters failed to report her claims to UVU’s Title IX Office, as required by law, and that the university failed to conduct an investigation.
“To compound its failures,” Sorenson wrote in the lawsuit, “UVU told [C.C.] what she experienced was not abuse, thereby fraudulently concealing the criminal acts she endured.”
An unexpected exam
S.D. hadn’t planned to get a breast exam or a Pap smear when she went into the student clinic during the fall semester in 2018, she said. She was 25 years old, and was hoping to connect with a care provider who could fill her prescriptions for her mental health. She also worried she may have polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), and noted that in paperwork she filled out before her exam.
She also answered “yes” to a question in that paperwork that asked whether she had been sexually assaulted in the past, she said. She remembers Pickering referencing that question in the exam room, she said, and asking if she had been tested for a sexually transmitted disease since the assault. She had not.
“He stood up and was walking towards the door and opened the door. And he’s like, ‘Well, we can do it right now if you want,’” she recalled.
S.D. said she was flustered and agreed, and Pickering handed her a paper gown and asked her to change. When he came back into the exam room, she said, there was a nurse with him.
But she felt like his body was blocking the nurse’s view of how he touched her breasts during the exam — touching which S.D. now says made her feel uncomfortable. After touching her breasts, Pickering conducted a Pap smear, she said.
S.D. said she left the exam feeling confused and embarrassed. Pickering was the first person who had touched these sensitive areas of her body since she was sexually assaulted, she said, so she thought to herself that her discomfort could have been a reaction to that.
For that reason, she said, she never reported to any officials prior to finding out about the other women’s reports.
‘They could have kept me safe’
Pickering left his job at UVU more than two years later. Owens, his attorney, has said that his client was asked to resign after he removed a patient’s IUD without a medical assistant in the room.
The attorney said the woman’s husband was present during the procedure, which he said the patient requested because of “severe and potentially life-threatening side effects” of the IUD. The attorney said Pickering tried to reschedule the appointment because his medical assistant had called out sick that day, but went forward with the procedure with the woman’s husband acting as a chaperone.
S.D. said in a recent interview that she felt betrayed when she learned that other women had reported similar experiences with him prior to her appointment.
“It’s extremely upsetting that they knew and that they could have protected me,” she said. “They could have kept me safe.”
Since leaving UVU, Pickering has twice been reported to police for alleged inappropriate touching while working at a Draper medical spa, Belle Medical.
A patient who saw him there for liposuction on her lower stomach in January 2022 told police she felt Pickering repeatedly touched her breast inappropriately during the treatment. Pickering denies touching her breast, Owens said, adding that she may have felt a cord that was attached to the surgical instrument.
The woman reported Pickering to Draper police the day after her procedure. She and some of the students who reported to police were reinterviewed by a Draper detective after another patient, Chelsi Rasmussen, accused Pickering in police reports and in a civil lawsuit last year of touching her inappropriately during a November 2021 procedure.
Rasmussen, who has agreed to be publicly named, had gone to Belle Medical for a cosmetic procedure where fat would be liposuctioned from other parts of her body and transferred to her breasts; she alleges in her civil lawsuit that Pickering touched her vagina and made comments about her body.
Pickering has filed a countersuit against Rasmussen, denying he sexually touched her and accused her of making false allegations to boost her career as an online influencer. The lawsuit is still pending.